Unhinged
Page 7
“That’s Mr. Ash,” he replied as if this explained enough noise to raise the dead.
But Lian Ash had said he would be over to discuss the work, not to begin it. We hadn’t even talked about costs or materials, and now he was ripping 200-year-old stones out of my walls with, it sounded like, a jackhammer.
Wade rinsed his cup, tied a red bandanna around his head to keep sweat from dripping while he worked on a Harpers Ferry rifle he was restoring for a client.
“George’ll bring Sam home,” he added. When he finished the rifle he planned to reload some shotgun shells, a chore that always made me nervous because it involves compressing explosive powder. But Wade said it was safe and that it was a waste of a good shotgun shell not to reload it.
A muffled oath rose from the cellar. “Son of a bore,” it sounded like. Moments later a puff of mortar dust preceded Lian Ash into the kitchen.
“There,” he uttered, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Now I see which way the wind blows. Next I’ll get jacks up, keep the house from fallin’ down while I pull out the bad areas.”
Dust ringed the outline of the respirator he’d been wearing; his blue eyes gleamed out from a coating of 200-year-old grit.
“Won’t you need some help?” Wade asked. “Big operation.”
“Yes, sir, I will. But not,” Lian Ash added, “with taking old stuff out. Too many men on that, ’fore you know it one of ’em’s pullin’ out somethin’ you haven’t braced yet. Somethin’ you have not entered into your calculations. Then you’ve got problems.”
He turned a serious gaze on me. “Speakin’ o’ problems, I’m sorry about that young feller of yours. Heard he took a weave and a bobble, last night. Glad he came out of it all right.”
Somehow just having the old man around made me feel better. “But Mr. Ash,” I added when I’d reassured him again about Sam’s welfare, “I need an idea of what you are going to charge for the foundation project, before you begin. An estimate, so I don’t get in too deep.”
“Ah, yes. Getting in too deep. A situation to be avoided if possible. Though sometimes it isn’t,” Lian Ash finished wisely.
He ran himself a glass of water and stood drinking it at the sink. “Chlorinated water. Wonderful invention. Quenches thirst, replenishes the cells, and kills germs on contact. Ahh,” he said appreciatively, setting the glass down.
Wade shot me a wink, vanishing back upstairs to work on the rifle and reload the shells, and when I turned again Mr. Ash was scribbling numbers on a pad of paper.
“This is the materials. This other number,” he poked at the pad with the stubby end of his pencil, “is the labor. Add it all up,” he poked at a third number, “you’ve got your estimate. Ten percent over or under.”
I looked at Mr. Ash and then at the number again, lower by half than what I had feared would be the result.
“This seems very reasonable,” I managed, expecting him to add some caveat: that when he got into the job things might change or that he might need more help, or more equipment.
He didn’t. But: “Mr. Ash, I don’t mean to be intrusive here. There is one other thing I need to talk to you about, though.”
His pale blue-eyed glance flickered alertly at me. “Where’ve I been all your life?”
“Well, yes.” I’d liked him so much, I hadn’t asked him for references when I’d hired him, and now I was sorry. “You see…”
He nodded slowly. “Man does his work, minds his business, no one cares where he comes from till there’s trouble. Like last night.”
Oh, dear. Now I’d offended him.
But when I looked up he was gazing at me without resentment. “It’s all right,” he said. “Things happen, you get nervous and want to make sure you’ve covered all your bases, is all.”
“That’s it exactly,” I agreed. It was this sense of immediate sympathy that had let me skip the references in the first place.
“I kicked around a few years,” he began slowly. “Fetched up here last winter, found a little house on the shore road needed fixing.”
Omitting any mention of how he had paid for the house on the shore road. But I didn’t need his financial vitae.
“Wasn’t it lonely?” Out there in winter, I meant. Eastport offers plenty of chances for social interaction, but if you take advantage of them you’ll be seen at them. And he hadn’t been.
“Not to me. I read a lot,” he explained. “Newspapers. And biographies. Did you know Frederick the Great wasn’t the warrior born an’ bred that most people think he was?”
As he spoke he drew idly on the notepad: bricks, a curving path in the jack-on-jack pattern. Simple, elegant.
“Young Frederick was a poet and composer,” he went on, “all he wanted to do was hang out and play music with his friends. But his father was cruel. Had a blood disease that all those royals had back then, all over Europe. Painful, and it made him mean.”
“Porphyria,” I supplied. I read a lot, too. In the old days I even read the New England Journal of Medicine. But this wasn’t what I wanted to discuss.
I quelled impatience as he went on with his story.
“Frederick got to be a teenager, him and a friend ran off. They got caught on account of a mix-up, a soldier mistook ’em for somebody they weren’t and arrested ’em. Fred’s father punished ’em both.”
Actually, it wasn’t quite like that. It was a misaddressed letter that tripped up young Frederick and his buddy, got the pair caught. But even as I remembered this I heard my own old New York pal Jemmy Wechsler, commenting in my head:
Quiet, youse could learn — something. That was before Jemmy moved uptown, took lessons with a speech coach so he could attract a better class of suckers.
Mr. Ash went on: “The friend’s punishment was, he got beheaded. Fred’s was, he had to watch. Right then, I figure Fred decided if anybody had power it was goin’ t’be him. Cuts way down on the lopping-the-heads-off-the-friends action, y’know.”
Power. It’s the name of the game, all right. I noted, too, how neatly Mr. Ash had turned the conversation away from himself.
But then he surprised me. “How I got started on reading was, I spent a stretch of time in the lockup. Was back in my drinking days, not around here, and not lately. You might say I’ve turned over a new leaf.”
I guessed he’d just needed a little time to get around to this in his own way. He went on agreeably: “Past few years, I’d been working in Portland. One day I took a ride, ended up here in Eastport.” He twinkled at me. “Saw the water, streets, and houses laid out like a postcard from the good old days. Sound familiar?”
Oh, of course it did. To a person of the right persuasion, finding Eastport was like falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. I still expected to find little bottles marked Eat Me and Drink Me on the shelves of the IGA.
“But,” he added, “fact is, you’re my first job here. If that makes you nervous, y’ want to get someone else to bid on this…”
He paused. Time for a decision: I could bring the whole job to a screeching halt while I scrutinized Mr. Ash’s background.
Or not. Jemmy used to say one way to decide if you could trust a guy was, the guy wasn’t offended if you didn’t trust him. Another was that the guy told you the bad stuff up front.
“No, Mr. Ash,” I said firmly. “Thanks for offering, but if it’s all the same to you I think we’ll go on as we’ve begun.”
He moved away from the sink, heading for the cellar door: a clean man with china-blue eyes, white hair, and knobby knuckles on his powerful, liver-spotted hands. “Well, then. In that case, I’ll just go down and finish the tear-out.”
In other words, exactly the kind of man you want working for you, slammer or not. Back in the city if I had worried about jail time, I’d have had to cut my client list by half.
“You got your own project started, I see,” he added, nodding at the ell. “Saw it yesterday, so I brought you a little something I thought might come in handy.”
The fact, I mean, that there wasn’t any, so the floor sucked the warmth right out of your feet when you went out there in the winter. But you couldn’t fix it in winter; if you opened a floor up then, you might just as well hook the furnace to it and pump warmth outdoors, not bothering to try heating the house.
The ell floor had slipped my mind completely in the recent chaos — so many disasters, so little time — but he must have seen where I’d begun tearing up the carpet over it, days earlier. Now he waved at a row of brown bags in the hall next to the cans of polyurethane and varnish remover.
“No sense buyin’ a whole roll of insulation for one spot,” he explained.
In the bags were strips of thick pink fibrous material, remnants from someone else’s insulation project: just what I needed.
“Come to think of it,” he allowed, “now’d be a good time to talk to your man, too. Something I’ve been wanting to ask him.”
So Lian Ash went up to Wade’s workshop, and the conversation must have been successful because not much later I heard him in the cellar again, his footsteps accompanied by the patter of old mortar falling and the creak of floor jacks being deployed. And I was just sitting there over my cooling coffee, kidding myself into thinking the day might actually be improving, when Ellie came in and made the comment that turned everything on its ear again.
“Harry decided too fast,” Ellie said, “that Sam’s crash was deliberate.”
“He said he’d heard Sam say the brakes failed,” I replied, gathering tools. A funny thing happens when I work with my hands; my brain kicks in, running in the background until it has solved whatever is worrying it.
Or it tries. “It was both brakes going that made Harry feel so suspicious,” I said. “Still, it was an old car and things happen to them. George drove his old truck until a rear wheel fell off,” I reminded her.
“That’s not my point.” Ellie followed me to the ell. A shedlike structure added after the main house was built, its shelves held a motley collection of Sam’s dive gear, Wade’s hunting gear, and the light summer clothes I wore one month out of every year.
“But Harry only met us a few hours earlier,” Ellie argued. “It isn’t sensible to believe Sam’s crash was deliberate and that it was connected to Harry’s old troubles.” She gestured as emphatically as she could with insulation material in her arms. “It’s too big a leap, someone’s hurting Sam on account of Harry.”
On my knees at the spot where the carpet met the wall I slid the box-cutter’s triangular blade from its slot and began sawing, using a metal ruler for a straightedge and working from the area where I’d already begun to tear up the carpet.
“So I think,” she concluded decisively, “we should ask Harry about it all again.”
With the box-cutter, I cut an oblong of carpet and lifted it out. Later I planned to coat the undersides of the carpet pieces with white glue, smear a similar coating of glue onto the plywood floor, and press the carpet pieces back down again where they had been.
“We might as well accuse Harry of causing the crash himself, then,” I told Ellie. “Because if it’s too big a conclusion to jump to afterwards, the only other explanation is that he must’ve known about it beforehand.”
I cut another carpet oblong. It wasn’t a solution any home-repair professional would have approved, but the carpet’s random pattern would make the fix unnoticeable.
“I’m not saying Harry’s responsible,” Ellie shot back. “I’m not even saying it was anything but an accident. All I’m saying is that either Harry’s a fruitcake nuttier than Harriet ever was, or there’s more to the story. More than he told you.”
God, I hoped not. I’d reported to her on the jack-in-the-box aspect of the conversation, my dad’s possible survival jumping out like the face on some startling, unbenevolent toy.
“Sam’ll be home soon,” she pointed out. “Don’t you want this settled before he gets here?”
I sighed, still wielding the razor-knife. “Ellie, there’s nothing to settle. If Harry didn’t have a bee in his bonnet over his own career crash, he wouldn’t be saying this stuff about Sam’s accident in the first place.”
That, anyway, was the simplest explanation, that Harry’s outburst had been triggered by his feelings, not by the facts. And until I had some other explanation, I intended to stick with it.
“All right, dear,” Ellie replied equably. “Suit yourself.”
Dee-yah: the woman was relentless. Removing the final carpet section, I glanced around to make sure I’d brought along a keyhole saw; the way I felt, I could have mistakenly grabbed a chain saw.
“Here,” Ellie said, passing me the sledgehammer instead.
Time to put a hole in my floor. I used the drill and a quarter-inch boring bit to make holes at the corners of the plywood section I planned to remove. Ellie took the drill from my hand and replaced it with the keyhole saw; I slipped the blade’s tip into a drill hole and began sawing.
“If we talk to Harry again,” she went on, “and it really does sound as if he’s just sort of…”
“Flying on one wing?” I repositioned the tip of the keyhole saw blade, slipping it into the second drill hole, and cut toward the wall again. “Obsessed by the idea that someone’s still out to get him, but not realistically?”
“Exactly,” Ellie said. “Then we probably don’t have to worry about some crazy unknown person getting up to something else.”
“Yeah,” I retorted. “Instead we can worry about a crazy known person: our new neighbor.” I got up; the room tilted.
“Jake?” Ellie said worriedly.
“I’m fine.” I shook my head, clearing it. The plywood piece had come free just as I’d planned. Pleased, I lifted it out.
Immediately, a dank gust blew from the crawl space beneath; there shouldn’t have been any airflow at all down there. Peering down, I spotted a telltale shaft of light angling from outdoors.
“Damn. Another break in the foundation.” I got up again.
“So your thought is, if Harry’s obsessed with his past but gives us no real reason to believe someone from his past is here—”
My ears roared; I’d stood up too quickly.
“Then we can feel safe,” she confirmed. “Jake, are you sure you’re okay?”
The roaring faded. “Will you please stop fussing over me? I said I’m fine. And open one of the bags, too, please. I’d like to get this job done while I’m young enough to remember how.”
The hole in the outer wall was an unexpected obstacle; I’d have to get Mr. Ash to look at that. But I could still insulate this area of floor, eliminating a spot so frigid that a person risked frostbite just walking out here on a December morning.
“And,” I gave in, mostly because if I didn’t she would never quit, “then we’ll find Harry.”
Some ancient wooden lath pieces stretched under the floor joists. I figured I’d just tuck all the insulation strips around those. “Maybe hearing what he says will set your mind at… gah!”
One minute I was reaching into the hole, groping around to gauge how much insulation to stuff in there and wondering if Mr. Ash had brought enough. The next I was yanking my hand back with a shudder as a spider the size of an aircraft carrier skittered up my arm and onto my shoulder.
“Where is it?” I demanded.
“I don’t see it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t see it? It’s a spider and it’s on me somewhere.”
“Hold still,” Wade suggested, appearing from upstairs.
“No problem,” I managed through lips clamped rigid in case the spider got any additional horrid ideas.
Wade held an empty jar in one hand, the lid in the other. “Keep,” he said conversationally, “still.”
You betcha. I felt a prickling sensation as of a leaf caught in my hair: a moving
leaf.
“Wow,” Ellie said, glancing at the floor where more of the creatures were emerging from the hole: big, brown ones, impressive and to me immediately recognizable.
“Gotcha,” Wade pronounced, closing the jar’s lid. The violin mark on the creature’s underside was visible through the glass.
I let my breath out. “Thank you.”
Brown recluse spiders were common in the warm climate where I’d grown up. Their bite, though rarely fatal, could have made me quite ill had I suffered it; back there, they lurked in woodpiles or in the dark corners of sheds. But not here. Not in Maine. The brown recluse was a warm-weather species, one I’d been delighted to leave behind when I’d moved northeast to Manhattan.
“You know, Ellie,” I said, watching Wade deftly capture the rest of the creatures, “maybe we do need to talk to Harry again.” Because my small carpentry job — and all those spiders — had indeed kicked my brain out of neutral.
Ellie was right. Whether or not Sam’s crash was an accident, Harry’s suspicions about it made no sense unless he had more reason for them than he was telling us. Also — and in the press of recent events this fact had escaped me till now — Harry’s arrival in Eastport coincided rather neatly with Harriet’s departure.
Too neatly. And those spiders: warm-weather spiders.
Spiders from away.
Chapter 4
Top Cat Productions had rented the Danvers’ house on Blaine Street, high on a hill overlooking the causeway and the mainland. It was an avenue of professionally restored old homes with wide, landscaped lawns and garages rebuilt out of the original carriage houses.
“I just want an answer: did he have a solid reason?” I said as we quick-stepped up the hill. The breeze off the water was like a chilly kiss, sweet with spring but still smelling faintly of last winter’s snow. “Or was all that somebody’s-still-after-me stuff just Harry, self-dramatizing?”
“Right,” said Ellie, to whom I’d repeated Bob Arnold’s sum-up: that Harry had taken his police work way too personally.